Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
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Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
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Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#2Colleagues of mine are paid users of Appcelerator's small business offering and have said the exact same thing: no community on the other side of the pay wall either, and little to no developer interaction.
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#3I had a similar experience with the platform. I was very excited, browsed through the APIs to check the required features were there and jumped in. It then took ages to get the right versions of SDKs/XCode and Titanium installed, which also involved searching though forum posts and patching files. Finally I got the "Kitchen Sink" app working. All was good.
I started implementing my app and quickly became flummoxed by the difference between seemingly identical windows (it's all down to "execution contexts" explained here http://iamwil.posterous.com/when-it-comes-to-titaniuminclude... not in the Titanium Docs).
And now Apple have made their subscription functionality the only game in town and that module (StoreKit) will cost a hefty Appcelerator subscription ($2500/yr, IIRC)
Bah... I've abandoned my Appelerator prototype and I'm going to try out PhoneGap which looks like it's really improved in the past ~6 months
Edit: typo
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#4This was about 5 months ago, so it's possible they drastically improved it in that time (although it doesn't sound like it). But I ran into the exact same issues.
Debugging was a pain because of you were writing JavaScript rather than Obj-C and the line or file on some errors were on were entirely unhelpful.
Performance (which you don't notice in the simulator) is poor. I was working with tables on iOS, even after cutting the app down to using 10 rows, people noticed a lot of lag on iPhone 4s (and it was unusable on a 3G or 3). This was with the only scroll events being a scroll position check suggested by the KitchenSink demo they provide.
Entirely possible this was something I missed, but while it says cross-platform, you don't really get cross-platform. The difference in UIs between Android and iOS means you're going to be writing quite a lot more code to actually get an app that works on both Android and iOS.
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Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#5Interesting, I experienced similar frustrations starting out with rhomobile and was hoping the grass was greener on the other side.
My ultimate complaint with rhomobile is that the "native" apps are running in the web browser. I plan go into further detail in an upcoming blog post / presentation.
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#6This was about 5 months ago, so it's possible they drastically improved it in that time (although it doesn't sound like it). But I ran into the exact same issues. Debugging was a pain because of you were writing JavaScript rather than Obj-C and the line or file on some errors were on were entirely unhelpful. Performance (which you don't notice in the simulator) is poor. I was working with tables on iOS, even after cu…
I haven't found on device performance to be too terrible for latest gen iPod Touch and iPhone 4. It's definitely inconsistent in places though.
You're dead right on debugging, it's pretty much guess and check, all the way through. Painful puts it mildly.
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#7I had a similar experience with the platform. I was very excited, browsed through the APIs to check the required features were there and jumped in. It then took ages to get the right versions of SDKs/XCode and Titanium installed, which also involved searching though forum posts and patching files. Finally I got the "Kitchen Sink" app working. All was good. I started implementing my app and quickly became flummoxed by…
I agree, PhoneGap today looks much better than it did when I started this project on Titanium about 6 months ago. I definitely wish I'd gone that route in retrospect.
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#8Yeah, it's too bad. I know a guy on the development team, and I think they're doing a great job given the complexity of the task they've taken on, but I can't recommend it for anything other than prototypes or very simple applications.
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#9I don't disagree with him but I still think Appcelerator is worth it. Because as annoying as Appcelerator can be it's still quicker than writing your app twice and Apple's devotion to objective-C makes it very hard to carry over code from other platforms.
I would give two warnings though (which are supported by the author's piece)...
1. You need to make sure your use case is covered in the Kitchen Sink example. If you can't take those pieces and put together what you want to build than you shouldn't bother with Appcelerator (the documentation is pretty useless)
2. You need to buy support. The community is non-existent but the staff support is pretty good. A lot of times their advice boils down to "just ignore that error" but that's helpful with a lot of the errors generated.
Also note Appcelerator just bought Aptana, a company that makes development software. So clearly they realize there's a problem are are taking steps to fix it.
Edit: One last thing in their defense. Though they've been slower than I'm happy with in making their platform easier they have added a lot of new features. Things like Bump, bar code reading, credit card reader support and in-app purchases aren't available elsewhere (though these were just announced so I don't know how well they work yet)
Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective
#10Lots of projects want to simplify the app development process, and there are even more startups working on automating the process. Ultimately it's fine for prototyping, but not much else. Performance becomes an issue and you rapidly hit it wall with anything but native apps.
It's good to get your feet wet and get excited about the platform, regardless of it being Android or iOS, but at some point you need to just bite the bullet and pick up a good book and start working.